learnPython Essentials of Python

Python is a high-level, object-oriented programming language useful to know for anyone analyzing data. The most important thing to know before learning Python, is that in Python, everything is an object. There is no compiling and no need to define the type of variables before using them. No need to allocate memory for variables. The code is very easy to learn and easy to read (syntax).

There is a large scientific community contributing to Python. Three of the most widely used libraries in Python are numpy, scipy, pandas, and matplotlib. In addition, users can use IPython which is an interactive command-line tool for the Python programming language. Most of the pages are written in an IPython Notebook which can be downloaded and executed on your own computer.

I wrote this tutorial (really an expanded cheatsheet) assuming the reader has some previous background in at least one programming language and some statistical background. The idea what things like for loops are will not be discussed, but rather the syntax of for loops in Python will be discussed.